The Hour of the Dragon
He grunted with satisfaction. The feel of the hilt cheered him and gave
him a glow of confidence. Whatever webs of conspiracy were drawn about
him, whatever trickery and treachery ensnared him, this knife was real.
The great muscles of his right arm swelled in anticipation of murderous
blows.
He tried the farther door, fumbling with the keys as he did so. It was
not locked. Yet he remembered the black man locking it. That furtive,
bent figure, then, had been no jailer seeing that the bolts were in
place. He had unlocked the door, instead. There was a sinister
suggestion about that unlocked door. But Conan did not hesitate. He
pushed upon the grille and stepped from the dungeon into the outer
darkness.
As he had thought, the door did not open into another corridor. The
flagged floor stretched away under his feet, and the line of cells ran
away to the right and left behind him, but he could not make out the
other limits of the place into which he had come. He could see neither
the roof nor any other wall. The moonlight filtered into that vastness
only through the grilles of the cells, and was almost lost in the
darkness. Less keen eyes than his could scarcely have discerned the dim
gray patches that floated before each cell door.
Turning to the left, he moved swiftly and noiselessly along the line of
dungeons, his bare feet making no sound on the flags. He glanced briefly
into each dungeon as he passed it. They were all empty, but locked. In
some he caught the glimmer of naked white bones. These pits were a relic
of a grimmer age, constructed long ago when Belverus was a fortress
rather than a city. But evidently their more recent use had been more
extensive than the world guessed.
Ahead of him, presently, he saw the dim outline of a stair sloping
sharply upward, and knew it must be the stair he sought. Then he whirled
suddenly, crouching in the deep shadows at its foot.
Somewhere behind him something was moving--something bulky and stealthy
that padded on feet which were not human feet. He was looking down the
long row of cells, before each one of which lay a square of dim gray
light that was little more than a patch of less dense darkness. But he
saw something moving along these squares. What it was he could not tell,
but it was heavy and huge, and yet it moved with more than human ease
and swiftness. He glimpsed it as it moved across the squares of gray,
then lost it as it merged in the expanses of shadow between. It was
uncanny, in its stealthy advance, appearing and disappearing like a blur
of the vision.
He heard the bars rattle as it tried each door in turn. Now it had
reached the cell he had so recently quitted, and the door swung open as
it tugged. He saw a great bulky shape limned faintly and briefly in the
gray doorway, and then the thing had vanished into the dungeon. Sweat
beaded Conan's face and hands. Now he knew why Tarascus had come so
subtly to his door, and later had fled so swiftly. The king had unlocked
his door, and, somewhere in these hellish pits, had opened a cell or
cage that held some grim monstrosity.
Now the thing was emerging from the cell and was again advancing up the
corridor, its misshapen head close to the ground. It paid no more heed
to the locked doors. It was smelling out his trail. He saw it more
plainly now; the gray light limned a giant anthropomorphic body, but
vaster of bulk and girth than any man. It went on two legs, though it
stooped forward, and it was grayish and shaggy, its thick coat shot with
silver. Its head was a grisly travesty of the human, its long arms hung
nearly to the ground.
Conan knew it at last--understood the meaning of those crushed and
broken bones in the dungeon, and recognized the haunter of the pits. It
was a gray ape, one of the grisly man-eaters from the forests that wave
on the mountainous eastern shores of the Sea of Vilayet. Half mythical
and altogether horrible, these apes were the goblins of Hyborian
legendry, and were in reality ogres of the natural world, cannibals and
murderers of the nighted forests.
He knew it scented his presence, for it was coming swiftly now, rolling
its barrel-like body rapidly along on its short, mighty bowed legs. He
cast a quick glance up the long stair, but knew that the thing would be
on his back before he could mount to the distant door. He chose to meet
it face to face.
Conan stepped out into the nearest square of moonlight, so as to have
all the advantage of illumination that he could; for the beast, he knew,
could see better than himself in the dark. Instantly the brute saw him;
its great yellow tusks gleamed in the shadows, but it made no sound.
Creatures of night and the silence, the gray apes of Vilayet were
voiceless. But in its dim, hideous features, which were a bestial
travesty of a human face, showed ghastly exultation.
Conan stood poised, watching the oncoming monster without a quiver. He
knew he must stake his life on one thrust; there would be no chance for
another; nor would there be time to strike and spring away. The first
blow must kill, and kill instantly, if he hoped to survive that awful
grapple. He swept his gaze over the short, squat throat, the hairy
swagbelly, and the mighty breast, swelling in giant arches like twin
shields. It must be the heart; better to risk the blade being deflected
by the heavy ribs than to strike in where a stroke was not instantly
fatal. With full realization of the odds, Conan matched his speed of eye
and hand and his muscular power against the brute might and ferocity of
the man-eater. He must meet the brute breast to breast, strike a
death-blow, and then trust to the ruggedness of his frame to survive the
instant of manhandling that was certain to be his.
As the ape came rolling in on him, swinging wide its terrible arms, he
plunged in between them and struck with all his desperate power. He felt
the blade sink to the hilt in the hairy breast, and instantly, releasing
it, he ducked his head and bunched his whole body into one compact mass
of knotted muscles, and as he did so he grasped the closing arms and
drove his knee fiercely into the monster's belly, bracing himself
against that crushing grapple.
For one dizzy instant he felt as if he were being dismembered in the
grip of an earthquake; then suddenly he was free, sprawling on the
floor, and the monster was gasping out its life beneath him, its red
eyes turned upward, the hilt of the poniard quivering in its breast. His
desperate stab had gone home.
Conan was panting as if after long conflict, trembling in every limb.
Some of his joints felt as if they had been dislocated, and blood
dripped from scratches on his skin where the monster's talons had
ripped; his muscles and tendons had been savagely wrenched and twisted.
If the beast had lived a second longer, it would surely have dismembered
him. But the Cimmerian's mighty strength had resisted, for the fleeting
instant it had endured, the dying convulsion of the ape that would have
torn a lesser man limb from limb.
6
The Thrust of a Knife
Conan stooped and tore the knife from the monster's breast. Then he went
swiftly up the stair. What other shapes of fear the darkness held he
could not guess, but he had no desire to encounter any more. This
touch-and-go sort of battling was too strenuous even for the giant
Cimmerian. The moonlight was fading from the floor, the darkness closing
in, and something like panic pursued him up the stair. He breathed a
gusty sigh of relief when he reached the head, and felt the third key
turn in the lock. He opened the door slightly, and craned his neck to
peer through, half expecting an attack from some human or bestial enemy.
He looked into a bare stone corridor, dimly lighted, and a slender,
supple figure stood before the door.
'Your Majesty!' It was a low, vibrant cry, half in relief and half in
fear. The girl sprang to his side, then hesitated as if abashed.
'You bleed,' she said. 'You have been hurt!'
He brushed aside the implication with an impatient hand.
'Scratches that wouldn't hurt a baby. Your skewer came in handy, though.
But for it Tarascus' monkey would be cracking my shin-bones for the
marrow right now. But what now?'
'Follow me,' she whispered. 'I will lead you outside the city wall. I
have a horse concealed there.'
She turned to lead the way down the corridor, but he laid a heavy hand
on her naked shoulder.
'Walk beside me,' he instructed her softly, passing his massive arm
about her lithe waist. 'You've played me fair so far, and I'm inclined
to believe in you; but I've lived this long only because I've trusted no
one too far, man or woman. So! Now if you play me false you won't live
to enjoy the jest.'
She did not flinch at sight of the reddened poniard or the contact of
his hard muscles about her supple body.
'Cut me down without mercy if I play you false,' she answered. 'The very
feel of your arm about me, even in menace, is as the fulfillment of a
dream.'
The vaulted corridor ended at a door, which she opened. Outside lay
another black man, a giant in turban and silk loin-cloth, with a curved
sword lying on the flags near his hand. He did not move.
'I drugged his wine,' she whispered, swerving to avoid the recumbent
figure. 'He is the last, and outer, guard of the pits. None ever escaped
from them before, and none has ever wished to seek them; so only these
black men guard them. Only these of all the servants knew it was King
Conan that Xaltotun brought a prisoner in his chariot. I was watching,
sleepless, from an upper casement that opened into the court, while the
other girls slept; for I knew that a battle was being fought, or had
been fought, in the west, and I feared for you....
'I saw the blacks carry you up the stair, and I recognized you in the
torchlight. I slipped into this wing of the palace tonight, in time to
see them carry you to the pits. I had not dared come here before
nightfall. You must have lain in drugged senselessness all day in
Xaltotun's chamber.
'Oh, let us be wary! Strange things are afoot in the palace tonight. The
slaves said that Xaltotun slept as he often sleeps, drugged by the lotus
of Stygia, but Tarascus is in the palace. He entered secretly, through
the postern, wrapped in his cloak which was dusty as with long travel,
and attended only by his squire, the lean silent Arideus. I cannot
understand, but I am afraid.'
They came out at the foot of a narrow, winding stair, and mounting it,
passed through a narrow panel which she slid aside. When they had passed
through, she slipped it back in place, and it became merely a portion of
the ornate wall. They were in a more spacious corridor, carpeted and
tapestried, over which hanging lamps shed a golden glow.
Conan listened intently, but he heard no sound throughout the palace. He
did not know in what part of the palace he was, or in which direction
lay the chamber of Xaltotun. The girl was trembling as she drew him
along the corridor, to halt presently beside an alcove masked with satin
tapestry. Drawing this aside, she motioned for him to step into the
niche, and whispered: 'Wait here! Beyond that door at the end of the
corridor we are likely to meet slaves or eunuchs at any time of the day
or night. I will go and see if the way is clear, before we essay it.'
Instantly his hair-trigger suspicions were aroused.
'Are you leading me into a trap?'
Tears sprang into her dark eyes. She sank to her knees and seized his
muscular hand.
'Oh, my king, do not mistrust me now!' Her voice shook with desperate
urgency. 'If you doubt and hesitate, we are lost! Why should I bring you
up out of the pits to betray you now?'
'All right,' he muttered. 'I'll trust you; though, by Crom, the habits